How singer gave Rolf Harris taste of his own medicine

How singer gave Rolf Harris taste of his own medicine

THE autobiography of Rolf Harris gave a few tantalising glimpses of the affairs and secret desires that cost him his reputation and his liberty.

He wrote of his regret about his failures as a father and how his global travels and his desperate desire for fame left him little time to spend with his own family.

Throughout the book - 'Can you tell what it is Yet?' - Harris pokes fun at himself and his apparently flirtatious naivety with women.

He tells of how he travelled with Sandie Shaw and her backing singers, the Ladybirds, while hosting the BBC's coverage of A Song for Europe.

Wearied by his constant over-the-top professions of admiration at her beauty, one of the singers, Gloria, tugged down Harris's flies and pulled out his penis.

"Are you gonna do something about this, or are you just gonna keep talking about it?" she asked him, according to his book.

"I couldn't think of a single thing to say. Instead I wanted to dissolve into a grease spot and soak into the carpet," he wrote.

"Not surprisingly, I stopped flirting with pretty young woman and embarrassing them in public. Glo had given me a taste of my own medicine."

There is no mention in the book by name of his daughter Bindi's best friend - with whom Harris admitted to a decade-long affair after she became an adult - but who told the court was first abused by the entertainer at the age of 13.

However, he does say: "One day she (Bindi) walked into the classroom and it was obvious all the kids had been talking about her because of the terrible guilty silence that followed. Bindi's best friend was in the group, and though they remained friends Bindi never felt she could trust her fully after that."

The woman claimed in court that she told Bindi what had happened years after they left school. Bindi Nicholls later said that her friend told her that it was an affair that started when she was 18 or 19.

In another of the attacks, Harris was convicted of molesting a teenager at a celebrity event in Cambridge after she came out of a marquee to see him down on his hands and knees barking at a dog.

She said that he was playing to the crowds gathered around him. Harris denied any knowledge of being in the city until he was confronted by television footage of the 1978 programme, but still denied abusing the teenager.

But his initial behaviour was similar to an episode he recounts in his book about a dog clamping its jaws around his face while he was filming Animal Hospital. "I was always getting down to their [the dogs'] level and making matching panting sounds or doing doggie sound effects," he said.

In the book, he said how he had been self-centred and did not realise how bored and lonely his wife Alwen had been while she followed him around the world to the point of "absolute despair".

"I have never been a perfect husband….. In short, I'm a real pain in the neck, which is probably why it has taken me so long to write my autobiography. I discovered that I wasn't the charming guy I originally thought I was."